They told her the lump on her chest was "probably just a cyst." But Christina Trieweiler Schmidt pushed for a diagnosis  and saved her own life

Most 26-year-old women do not have this sort of story to tell. Not when they are the picture of health, born and bred on clear Montana air, with the sparkle in their eyes to prove it. Not when they balance life as a single mother and speech-language pathologist with running marathons, eating and living organically, and contributing to a small town  where they are loved and supported and live across the street from their parents. Most 26-year-olds with this sort of harmonious life do not face a devastating illness  nor do they need to become insistent on care that turns out to be lifesaving. But this one did.

In September 2006, Christina Trieweiler was listening to a sermon in church as her 2-year-old daughter, Emma, rested her head against her chest. "I felt something  a small lump  just below my clavicle," she remembers. A few weeks later, during Emma's routine checkup, Christina showed the lump to their family doctor. "It's probably just a cyst," he told her, "given its location. But watch to see if it grows."

It didn't get bigger, but the lump still nagged at Christina. She was also getting sick more often and feeling more tired than usual, but figured that was normal given her busy life.

Nearly a year later, while wearing a strapless dress, she caught a glimpse of the lump in an elevator mirror. "It's not right," she said to her boyfriend, Jason Schmidt, a family physician.

"If it bothers you, get it checked," Jason casually remarked.

The surgeon Christina saw was equally unconcerned, agreeing that the lump was likely a benign cyst. Still, he offered to remove it if she wanted him to; he warned, however, that she might not be happy with the scar. Christina didn't care about a scar. "I just want it out," she insisted.

The procedure took only a few minutes, during which the two of them joked about goings-on in their Montana valley. There was no reason for anyone to think the lump might be cancer, but Christina urged the surgeon to send the tissue sample to a pathology lab anyway. "I'm not sure why," she says now. "Maybe because I'm in the medical field." Or maybe it was intuition.

A SHOCKING REPORT

That was Wednesday, August 22, 2007. The following Monday, the surgeon called Christina at work. "I knew it couldn't be good news," she says. It turned out the growth wasn't a cyst at all, but an enlarged lymph node, the doctor said. She had cancer: Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"I was in shock," says Christina. She had to get out of the clinic, so she walked out to her car and, shaking, called her dad at his law office in downtown Whitefish. "I have cancer!" she cried. Her father, assuring her he'd be right there, left his office immediately, got onto the highway, and met her in the clinic's parking lot, about half an hour away from his office. "I can't even imagine what that drive was like for him," says Christina. In fact, she began to worry about all the people she loved  her parents, her two sisters, and Jason. Although they'd only been dating for six months, the relationship was getting very serious. But most of all, Christina's heart hurt for her daughter. She couldn't bear to think of leaving her little girl.

And so, for the next week, while her family and Jason operated in high gear, educating themselves about treatment and contacting everyone they knew with medical connections, Christina focused only on Emma. "I didn't want to miss a moment of the time we had," she says.

Briefly, Christina considered trying alternative treatments, too: helping to fight the cancer through diet changes or by seeing a healer a friend had mentioned. "But I was so scared; I just didn't have the emotional energy to look thoroughly into alternatives," she says. Plus, she just wanted to get rid of the cancer: "I'd had a scan, and I could see the tumors all the way down my sternum and along my clavicle and neck. And the cancer had been there for at least a year."

Something else happened, too, that put Christina off. She talked to one alternative practitioner about doing a cleanse, but felt the woman was blaming her for having gotten cancer: "That was the last thing I needed. We have no idea how I got sick. I thought it was terrible to imply it was something I'd done, especially since I was so young and had lived such a healthy life."

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